Leaders, Marketing and Beginner’s Mind

Generally speaking, business leaders do not have a clear understanding of marketing. I have found many misinterpretations. Some of the more common ones are:

• Marketing is advertising, I can place my own ads
• We get all of our business from referrals and don’t need to waste the money, but business is down
• I know everyone else is doing it, but we are waiting to find the right person
• I want to pay 1990 prices to get 2022 results.
• We tried that and sent out some really amazing offers that we all wanted to buy ourselves, but didn’t get a good response
• We only want AAA leads that 75% of them close on the first call

Marketing in 2022 is complicated and demanding. It takes a professional to unravel your situation, get your tech stack aligned with your goals and produce pieces that can be communicated to specific target markets clearly and on time. It takes discipline, an open mind and the willingness to change when the results aren’t there.

I have had recent conversations with all of the examples above. The misconceptions get in the way of the results they want. A straight forward adjustment to their paradigm would allow amazing results. It’s simply “beginner’s mind”. What is going on here? What are we trying to do? What do you think our course of action should be?

If, as a business leader, you ask your agency, marketing department or prospective marketing consultant “What do you recommend we do?”, magic will happen, birds will sing and amazing marketing will be created. The logical follow up is to ask “How long do you anticipate that taking and how will it cost?”, but those questions come later. Beginner’s mind allows for the conversation and plan to develop.

Each and every campaign I have created over the last 30 years has started with who are we trying to reach and how can we do it efficiently? In the current market, there are multiple ways to contact prospects. Sometimes I can get to them easily, sometimes it takes all of the methods – it depends on the market.

 So, I recommend that today you ask some questions of your marketing team and listen to the answers. If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is.